I’ve been thinking about the state of this blog for the last several weeks. I upgraded my virtual server and had the opportunity to bring over the blog and associated software dependencies and data. When I first started this blog it actually had a fair bit of traffic on several of the posts that had information relevant enough for enough developers. That was the intent. Find something interesting while developing software, write a bit about it.

Then sites like Stack Overflow started coming online. I remember when one of my blog posts was linked to by an answer on Stack Overflow and my traffic for that blog post spiked. Since then, I, like many others, have created profiles on the various Stack* sites and probably am more likely to answer a question on there instead of take the time to write up a blog post on something.

Anyway, just some random thoughts. Perhaps I’ll think of a new direction to take this blog.

So my slicer software of choice (Simplify3D) gives me some estimates on filament length for a printed part. That’s handy enough but my filament is wrapped around a spool and it’s a little bit unclear exactly how long that length of filament that is left is before it runs out.

So… apply math instead.

Weight the spool. (Scale gives me oz but if you have a grams scale that’s a good thing.
Full spool is about 43 oz or so. (Multiply by 28.3493 to get grams if you need)
Subtract the weight of an empty spool. I got around 7.7 oz for this.

Result: I have 997 grams of plastic on a full spool. Good they sell in 1kg rolls.

So… how long is that left. Convert grams to volume. You get this from the type of plastic you’re using.

ABS

PLA

If you multiply that and the grams, you can get the volume in for your roll.

Result: Full roll of PLA is about and ABS around .

Lastly, how long is it? You just need to divide by the cross section area of the filament diameter.

So for 1.75mm filament (Lets convert that to cm to keep units the same).

Over the last few weeks I noticed this site becoming steadily slower. Turns out I had an unusual amount of requests for /xmlrpc.php.. which in turn caused the server to use up all it’s http processes answering bogus rpc queries for ping backs and whatnot that the nice script kiddies all over the world are trying to exploit I guess.

So… took care of that. Hopefully things are back to normal. I’ll have to go back and re-evaluate if I actually want any of that functionality I guess.